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The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time | 
 enlarge | Author: Jeffrey Sachs
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $17.00
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Rating:  115 reviews
Sales Rank: 2858
Media: Paperback
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0143036580
Dewey Decimal Number: 339.46091724
EAN: 9780143036586
Publication Date: February 28, 2006
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Amazon.com Review
Celebrated economist Jeffrey Sachs has a plan to eliminate extreme poverty around the world by 2025. If you think that is too ambitious or wildly unrealistic, you need to read this book. His focus is on the one billion poorest individuals around the world who are caught in a poverty trap of disease, physical isolation, environmental stress, political instability, and lack of access to capital, technology, medicine, and education. The goal is to help these people reach the first rung on the "ladder of economic development" so they can rise above mere subsistence level and achieve some control over their economic futures and their lives. To do this, Sachs proposes nine specific steps, which he explains in great detail in The End of Poverty. Though his plan certainly requires the help of rich nations, the financial assistance Sachs calls for is surprisingly modest--more than is now provided, but within the bounds of what has been promised in the past. For the U.S., for instance, it would mean raising foreign aid from just 0.14 percent of GNP to 0.7 percent. Sachs does not view such help as a handout but rather an investment in global economic growth that will add to the security of all nations. In presenting his argument, he offers a comprehensive education on global economics, including why globalization should be embraced rather than fought, why international institutions such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank need to play a strong role in this effort, and the reasons why extreme poverty exists in the midst of great wealth. He also shatters some persistent myths about poor people and shows how developing nations can do more to help themselves. Despite some crushing statistics, The End of Poverty is a hopeful book. Based on a tremendous amount of data and his own experiences working as an economic advisor to the UN and several individual nations, Sachs makes a strong moral, economic, and political case for why countries and individuals should battle poverty with the same commitment and focus normally reserved for waging war. This important book not only makes the end of poverty seem realistic, but in the best interest of everyone on the planet, rich and poor alike. --Shawn Carkonen
Product Description
A landmark exploration of the way out of extreme poverty for the world s poorest citizens
Among the most eagerly anticipated books of any year, this landmark exploration of prosperity and poverty distills the life work of an economist Time calls one of the world s 100 most influential people. Sachs s aim is nothing less than to deliver a big picture of how societies emerge from poverty. To do so he takes readers in his footsteps, explaining his work in Bolivia, Russia, India, China, and Africa, while offering an integrated set of solutions for the interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that challenge the poorest countries. Marrying passionate storytelling with rigorous analysis and a vision as pragmatic as it is fiercely moral, The End of Poverty is a truly indispensable work.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 110 more reviews...
 Nobel Prize Material with One Small Flaw April 6, 2006
Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States)
36 out of 58 found this review helpful
From an American perspective, now that everyone knows Senator John Edwards has focused on poverty as the underpinning for his revisitation of the "two Americas" divide (see also Barbara Ehrenreich Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and David Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible in America, this book should receive even more attention.
The author is extraordinary, and I take issue with some of the quibbling pot shots (when you are in fact so central to something that both the UN Secretary General and the President of Columbia University want you in the top position, perhaps you just might *be* central).
The most important thing I can say about this book is that the timing is perfect--there is a "correlation of forces" emerging that combines An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths (see my review of that book), The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (ditto), Collective Intelligence (see my review of Tom Atlee, The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All) and a massive public awareness that both the Republican and Democratic parties are corrupt and dysfunctional (see Peter Peterson's Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It and Tom Coburn's Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders ), and that the rampant unilateral evangelical militarism and immoral capitalism that the Bush dynasty has imposed on the earth is in fact a stake in the heart of the American Republic.
It may not be an exaggeration to say that this book represents the pinnacle of "new thinking" in which the public is energized into realizing three great precepts:
1) Republics belong to the people--the government of a Republic can be dissolved by the people when it becomes pathologically dysfunctional. See The Vermont Manifesto.
2) Sovereignty as defined by the Treaty of Westphalia is passe, in that it supports 44 dictators and massive corruption, censorship, genocide, state crime, and so on. There is a place for sovereignty, but only when certain standards of legitimacy, morality, transparency, and sustainability are present. See Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025 and Philipp Allott's The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State.
3) Poverty is the fulcrum issue for the world, just as democracy is the fulcrum issue for America. If one reads this book in combination with C. K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks), it is crystal clear that a shift of money from militarism to education, health, wireless access, and micro-cash economics will unleash the entrepreneurial innovation of five billion people, and literally save the world.
There are a number of stellar aspects to this book.
The author warms my heart when he slams the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank for being ignorant and having the wrong economic model. His articulations of the need for "differential diagnosis," and for the development of "clinical economics" are Nobel Prize material. He is right on target when he lambastes the IMF for overlooking "poverty traps, agronomy, climate, disease, transport, gender, and a host of other pathologies." A different take on the IMF and World Bank is provided by John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man while the contributing delinquency of immoral multinational corporations is addressed by William Grieder in The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy and US insanities are addressed by Clyde Prestowitz in Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions.
The author has clearly been influenced by Paul Farmer and his book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (California Series in Public Anthropology, 4) and uses the emergency medicine model to discuss how clinical economics varies from developmental economics. One could say that some nations need to learn to read and feed themselves first, and only after doing so, are they capable of moving up the rung. Lest anyone think the author is over-reaching, he is quite clear on limiting his objective to the elimination of EXTREME poverty, not all poverty.
The bottom line is quite clear: for just 1% of the US GDP, or a 5% surcharge on families making over $200,000 a year, extreme poverty can be eliminated by the year 2025. Anyone familiar with Hans Morgenthau and the "sources of national power" will understand that people rather than geography or resources or military power are the fundamental unit. People can think and share information and innovate. The author clearly discusses how disease destroys labor--including the entire male working class in Africa, and how disease, poverty, and education interact. The checklist for "medical triage" of a country, on page 84, is superb. The "big five" interventions are Agricultural, Health, Education, power-transport-communications, and safe drinking water-sanitation.
The author takes special care to dispel a number of myths, chief among them the myth that African corruption makes foreign aid irrelevant. While there is a great deal to be said for aid mis-management leading to black markets and such (see William Shawcross, Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict) the bottom line is clear: the US Government is both well behind other more enlightened governments in its rate of giving, and downright incompetent at "doing" aid. Indeed, the author can be noted for his general critique of all "official advice" as being generally ignorant.
This is not an ivory tower idealist. He discusses ten examples of global scale success stories from the Green Revolution to cell phones in Bangladesh, and settles on Stabilization, Liberalization, Privatization, Social Safety Net, and Institutional Harmonization as the steps needed to migrate from failed state to stabilized state.
Interestingly, he disassociates himself from the Harvard professors that helped the Russian oligarchs loot the Russian state through predatory privatization, and deliberately slams Professor Andrew Shleifer's role on page 144.
The author appears to be the first person to write a fifteen page plan for migrating a country (Poland) from a socialist economy to a market economy, writing from midnight to dawn due to local time pressures. This book is nothing short of riveting. It will stand the test of time as a prescription that can be explained to the voters, understood by politicians, and enforced by democratic elections.
There is only one small flaw: ending poverty will increase the number of stronger beings jostling for a move up in the pecking order. The program will need to be accompanied by both very strong militaries and police, and by very strong conservation efforts to keep increasingly strong billions from fighting over decresing resources.
EDIT of 11 Dec 07: Since reading this book, 24 of us have come together to co-found the Earth Intelligence Network, and we have a vision for teaching the five billion poor "one cell call at a time" using Telelanguage.com and 100 million volunteers with Skype and Internet access, covering among them the needed 183 languages. By creating wealth locally (see below list of representative books), this is stabilizing and addresses my own concern from the earlier review.
See also:
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
and most importantly,
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
John Zxerce's comment March 18, 2005
Gordon C. Mccord (New York, NY USA)
98 out of 123 found this review helpful
I would just like to clarify 2 issues regarding Mr. Zxerce's comment on U.S. development assistance.
First, using numbers from 2000 (as Mr. Zxerce does), the OECD reports that the U.S. gave only $7.4 billion in net official development assistance. Mr. Zxerce claims the government gave $22.6 billion (a number from a USAID report) which includes all money going to developing countries, most of which does not go towards development purposes (a lot goes to Israel; military education, training, and loans; and antiterrorism). The issue is not to focus on total government flows to developing countries, but to report how much of it is actually going towards development (to make investments in health, education, and infrastructure, for example). Prof. Sachs' recent Foreign Affairs piece "The Development Challenge" takes a very detailed look at how U.S. aid is used, showing how little actually makes it to the ground for real development. The article will help clarify most of these points, and can be downloaded at www.sachs.earth.columbia.edu under "Publications"
Second, the USAID report that Mr. Zxerce's numbers come from claims that private giving to developing countries was $33.6 billion in 2002. However, this is misleading because $18 billion of this amount is individual remittances, which are not development aid at all but income transfers between family members in the United States and abroad. Counting remittances as development assistance would be tantamount to counting incomes of American expatriates sent back to the U.S. as international assistance from the rest of the world to the U.S.
I hope people take time to read the book carefully, as it will help clarify the issues of how much the United States actually gives, and how an increased American effort could help meet the Millennium Development Goals and make a safer and more prosperous world.
Fascinating look at development economics May 8, 2005
Pistol Pete (Houston, TX United States)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Professor Sachs gives a great tour of the world and its economic problems. He gives personal accounts of helping the economies of Bolivia, Poland, India, Russia and to a limited extent China. Most attempts at helping were successful (Russia, which had deeper and more entrenched problems, was a notable exception). Sachs gives sound advice on what works and what doesn't in really really poor countries. He also lays out how little it would take from America and other developed nations to make it all happen.
The one downside is that for Sachs' plan to work, foreign governments have to be willing to cooperate. It's kind of a Catch-22. The US is not willing to donate large amounts of money if it is used poorly, and foreign governments aren't going to be able to spend wisely if they don't have very much. But really - we are spending hundreds of billions fighting the war in Iraq to "help the Iraqi people". But we could help many more people much more efficiently if we just committed to do it.
Overall, one of the most interesting economics books I have ever read (and I have read a few).
This book challenged my self image as a hard-nosed realist July 9, 2006
Eric D. Austrew (Brookline, MA United States)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
This book changed my outlook in two ways.
First, it redefined what I think of as poverty. For me and I'm sure for many others who haven't thought about it deeply, "poverty" called up images that ranged from trailer parks to ghettos to third-world sweatshops to famine stricken villages. When Sachs speaks of ending poverty he is referring to extreme poverty of famines and state failures only, and not the relative poverty found in affluent countries. While someone born into a ghetto may not have the same opportunities as someone born in a suburb, they are unlikely to die because of a lack of food, water, or shelter. In countries stricken by extreme poverty, by contrast, millions die each year because "they are too poor to live."
By concentrating on just this set of extremely poor people, Sachs usefully narrows the scope of the problem he wants to address. As a hard-nosed realist, I would take issue with anyone utopian enough to think that relative poverty can be eliminated, especially after the disastorous attempts to do just that by the Communist countries of the last century. But Sachs does not want to give every sweatshop worker a BMW or every trailer park dweller a diamond ring. He wants us to take on the task of restructuring the world so that death because of want no longer happens. It's something that we in the first world have proved is possible, since we have already done it for our own citizens.
This leads to the second way this book changed my outlook. Sachs spends the majority of the book showing how most of the extremely poor people of the world live in countries that simply do not have the capability of helping themselves. Most countries, even those in the third world, have entered the "virtous cycle" of capital accumulation and investment. But in the extremely poor countries all existing capital is consumed simply to stay alive. Indeed, in many cases the amount of capital per person is decreasing thanks to a growing population or environmental degredation. The problems that I had always thought of as the key factors to helping these countries, such as less corruption/better governance or culture factors like women's rights, are not at the root of poverty. In fact, given the in-depth explanations in this book I am now convinced that it is possible to have a perfectly governed, free, and equitable country that is nonetheless doomed to unending poverty and suffering.
The only way out of the poverty trap is an infusion of capital from outside to pay for basic infrastructure and development. That is where our task, and our moral responsibility, begins. If, like me, you always considered poverty an unfortunate but unavoidable condition of the world at large I urge you to read this book. It makes a clear and compelling case that if we commit ourselves we can make the world a radically better place.
Silver Bullet for John Edwards? Solid Thinking for the Rest of Us April 4, 2006
Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States)
5 out of 11 found this review helpful
Now that everyone knows Senator John Edwards has focused on poverty as the underpinning for his revisitation of the "two Americas" divide (see also Barbara Ehrenreich "Nickel and Dimed" and David Shipler's "Working Poor," this book should receive even more attention.
The author is extraordinary, and I take issue with some of the quibbling pot shots (when you are in fact so central to something that both the UN Secretary General and the President of Columbia University want you in the top position, perhaps you just might *be* central).
The most important thing I can say about this book is that the timing is perfect--there is a "correlation of forces" emerging that combines "An Army of Davids" (see my review of that book), "The Left Hand of God (ditto), Collective Intelligence (see my review of Tom Atlee, "The Tao of Democracy,") and a massive public awareness that both the Republican and Democratic parties are corrupt and dysfunctional (see Peter Peterson's "Running on Empty" and Tom Coburn "Breach of Trust"), and that the rampant unilateral evangelical militarism and immoral capitalism that the Bush dynasty has imposed on the earth is in fact a stake in the heart of the American Republic.
It may not be an exaggeration to say that this book represents the pinnacle of "new thinking" in which the public is energized into realizing three great precepts:
1) Republics belong to the people--the government of a Republic can be dissolved by the people when it becomes pathologically dysfunctional.
2) Sovereignty as defined by the Treaty of Westphalia is passe, in that it supports 44 dictators and massive corruption, censorship, genocide, state crime, and so on. There is a place for sovereignty, but only when certain standards of legitimacy, morality, transparency, and sustainability are present.
3) Poverty is the fulcrum issue for the world, just as democracy is the fulcrum issue for America. If one reads this book in combination with C. K. Prahalad's "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid," it is crystal clear that a shift of money from militarism to education, health, wireless access, and micro-cash economics will unleash the entrepreneurial innovation of five billion people, and literally save the world.
There are a number of stellar aspects to this book.
The author warms my heart when he slams the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank for being ignorant and having the wrong economic model. His articulations of the need for "differential diagnosis," and for the development of "clinical economics" are Nobel Prize material. He is right on target when he lambastes the IMF for overlooking "poverty traps, agronomy, climate, disease, transport, gender, and a host of other pathologies." A different take on the IMF and World Bank is provided by John Perkins in "Confessional of an Economic Hit Man" while the contributing delinquency of immoral multinational corporations is addressed by William Grieder in "The Soul of Capitalism" and US insanities are addressed by Clyde Prestowitz in "Rogue Nation."
The author has clearly been influenced by Paul Farmer and his book "The Pathologies of Power," and uses the emergency medicine model to discuss how clinical economics varies from developmental economics. One could say that some nations need to learn to read and feed themselves first, and only after doing so, are they capable of moving up the rung. Lest anyone think the author is over-reaching, he is quite clear on limiting his objective to the elimination of EXTREME poverty, not all poverty.
The bottom line is quite clear: for just 1% of the US GDP, or a 5% surcharge on families making over $200,000 a year, extreme poverty can be eliminated by the year 2025. Anyone familiar with Hans Morgenthau and the "sources of national power" will understand that people rather than geography or resources or military power are the fundamental unit. People can think and share information and innovate. The author clearly discusses how disease destroys labor--including the entire male working class in Africa, and how disease, poverty, and education interact. The checklist for "medical triage" of a country, on page 84, is superb. The "big five" interventions are Agricultural, Health, Education, power-transport-communications, and safe drinking water-sanitation.
The author takes special care to dispel a number of myths, chief among them the myth that African corruption makes foreign aid irrelevant. While there is a great deal to be said for aid mis-management leading to black markets and such (see William Shawcross, "Deliver Us From Evil,") the bottom line is clear: the US Government is both well behind other more enlightened governments in its rate of giving, and downright incompetent at "doing" aid. Indeed, the author can be noted for his general critique of all "official advice" as being generally ignorant.
This is not an ivory tower idealist. He discusses ten examples of global scale success stories from the Green Revolution to cell phones in Bangladesh, and settles on Stabilization, Liberalization, Privatization, Social Safety Net, and Institutional Harmonization as the steps needed to migrate from failed state to stabilized state.
Interestingly, he disassociates himself from the Harvard professors that helped the Russian oligarchs loot the Russian state through predatory privatization, and deliberately slams Professor Andrew Shleifer's role on page 144.
The author appears to be the first person to write a fifteen page plan for migrating a country (Poland) from a socialist economy to a market economy, writing from midnight to dawn due to local time pressures. This book is nothing short of riveting. It will stand the test of time as a prescription that can be explained to the voters, understood by politicians, and enforced by democratic elections.
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